This spring I took advantage of my IUAA membership and signed up for a free professional development webinar on social media from Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick, hosted by the IUAA’s Career and Professional Development team. I signed up to gain knowledge for my business but my volunteer work with the Indiana University Marching Hundred also benefited.

My webinar takeaways were:

• Pictures & videos engage more people than text alone
• Use Canva for easy-to-create images & pictographs
• Keep Power Point presentations to 10 slides, 20 minutes & 30 point font
• Take advantage of data collected by Facebook

During the summer, I made a presentation on behalf of the Marching Hundred Alumni Council (MHAC) at the National Alumni Athletic Band Symposium in Seattle this summer using the 10/20/30 concept. It was actually my very first Power Point presentation, so the 10/20/30 rule gave this rookie an easy to remember format. I provided detailed information in a separate handout that the audience could read at their own pace afterwards.

In early September, the MHAC started gearing up for Homecoming registration. Homecoming is our annual reunion event, allowing our alumni to take the field once again. Once again, I drew on the things I learned in the social media webinar to help promote our event. I created a series of Canva images called “Reasons to attend Homecoming” using universal themes to encourage registration.

Canva, (www.canva.com), is an online design platform, allowing anyone who can drag and drop to create images, charts and infographics. The site has pre-loaded fonts, images, layouts, and clip art that be combined in endless combinations. Users can upload their own pictures to the incorporate in the layouts. Canva allows users to select the desired format so the images are pre-formatted for Facebook banner, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media sizes.

The site is pretty easy to learn and has a variety of tutorials. Some images, layouts and universal formats require a fee; however, an endless number of polished looking images and infographics can be created for free.

The tagline “Reasons to attend Homecoming” was added to pictures to address our alumni base as a whole and smaller groups such as drumline, Red Steppers, and Flag Corps.

We kicked off the campaign with an image of former Marching Hundred director Ray Cramer, who was returning to his first Homecoming since his retirement in 2005. Any picture with Mr. Cramer stated “Reasons to attend Homecoming 2015.” All other images were not date specific so the images could be used for future Homecomings.

Although only 20% of our alumni are part of the Jacobs School of Music, we also posted this initial image to the IU Jacobs School of Music Alumni Facebook page to help spread the word.

Using Facebook page administrator “Insights,” we were able to see data from our posts that included the ages, geographic location, and time of day that people were visiting our page. This information helped us select photographs that best represented our Facebook audience and plan when to schedule the posts.

As people commented to the Facebook posts and images, we responded with a comment or a “like”. It was wonderful to learn about our alumni through the stories they shared online and to turn that information into conversation starters when we saw them at Homecoming.

When people “like” a post or share comment, the administrator can invite these people to “like” the Facebook page. Every few days, we went through all of the likes and invited these people to like our page.

We also used the Canva/Facebook combination to let our alumni know about other event sign-ups.

Since the IU Marching Hundred is our student base, we also “like” their page, allowing us to tag them in any of our posts. This is another way we engage with our future alumni, letting them know that they will always have an alumni home with the Marching Hundred Alumni Council.

Our most popular Facebook post in October 2015 wasn’t even Homecoming related but a post to wish the IU Marching Hundred a safe trip to Michigan State.

Here are some different resources to find content your alumni might find interesting:

• Facebook pages for:
  • Indiana University
  • Indiana University Alumni Association
  • Indiana Athletics
  • Indiana Daily Student
  • The Herald-Times
• Indiana University Office of Archives and Records Management – Archives Photograph Collection https://libraries.indiana.edu/archives
• Mapcustomizer – www.mapcustomizer.com

By using graphics, Facebook tools and shared content, the Marching Hundred Alumni Council’s page reached increased by 82% during the same time period the week of and the week after Homecoming 2014 and Homecoming 2015. This two-week period is our group’s busiest Facebook traffic timeframe.

I participated in the IUAA professional development webinar to help my business but found that I used it a lot more for the MHAC. Because of the time spent creating the Homecoming campaign, I am much more confident with social media skills and am able to create images more efficiently for my business. Definitely an all-around win for this Hoosier alumna and volunteer!

Jann Fujimoto
President, Marching Hundred Alumni Council